The Psychologist
Prologue
The sea is cold, closing over her head as she sinks, spinning into darkness.
The channel is surprisingly deep, the current tugging at her like an invisible rope.
It was stupid to wade out into the estuary, but she doesn’t care.
She didn’t want to cross it, she just thought how peaceful it looked, how enticing: the smooth water striped with moonlight.
And she wanted to get away from everything for a bit.
From them.
From the tension roiling between them all, the unravelling ribbons of their friendship that have come unknotted to trail free …
And from her own thoughts.
She’s made mistakes, she knows that … Hasn’t always been a good person.
When it gets too deep to wade, she sinks into the water, letting it soak her dress until her skirts rise and puff out on the swell. It feels nice, the water swirling around her legs. She shouldn’t swim here, she knows that. The currents are too unpredictable in the estuary and the tide moves fast.
Plus she’s drunk, high and … sad.
But it is so tempting to slip beneath the sea, to feel it hold her, buffet her, take control. To fill her ears with silence, and noise.
To watch her pale limbs slice the water, feel her hair slip like seaweed against her skin, her skirts tangling around her thighs as she sinks. Down, down …
Sometimes, when the darkness creeps in, she just needs to be alone … Where better to seek solitude than the cold sea in the wee hours of a Fife dawn?
She surfaces, treads water as she looks from one still-darkened shoreline to another.
The tips of Tentsmuir forest are inky black against the sky, and the beach glows with the gleam of their dwindling bonfire, while town lights shimmer in the distance.
She debates swimming further, enticed by the freedom of the water, the peace from her own mind.
But common sense pushes past the seduction of the sea, and the fog of whatever drug swims in her bloodstream – scooped onto her tongue in a neat little tablet taken huddled in the dunes.
She should go back to safety and the others.
She strikes out towards the spiralling smoke, remembering the exhilaration of those towering flames a few hours before when the night was young and full of promise.
At the water’s edge, silhouetted against the coming dawn, the urban lights and driftwood glow, stands a figure. Waiting for her.
Wading, now, towards her.